Mons. Juan Antonio Martínez Camino, Auxiliary Bishop of Madrid, highlights Pope Benedict XVI as a “prophet of hope”, as well as a critic of “Pagan Modernity” and “modernized Christianity”, in a recent article published in the newspaper ABC from Spain.
“Two years without Benedict XVI?“, is the title of the text published on Friday, January 3, in which the Spanish prelate highlights the relevance of the teaching of Joseph Ratzinger, who died on December 31, 2022, who “is very critical of a pagan Modernity, worshiper of the new idol of progress, which has already demanded so many tears and so much blood from its followers. He is also critical of a modernized Christianity, lacking lucidity and somewhat self-conscious that has allowed itself to be seduced by the lure of the new idol.”
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“But, above all – the bishop emphasizes – Pope Ratzinger remains with us as a prophet of hope for a Modernity that can still save its best achievements. It will be a good inspiration for the Jubilee Year 2025, opened under the motto of hope that does not disappoint.”
Bishop Martínez Camino also highlights that Benedict XVI “has contributed to a deeper and more current understanding of Revelation as a historical and personal event. It is the unique personal event of Jesus Christ and of his Church, of his saints, which opens to Humanity a hope that does not disappoint and a freedom that does not devour itself.”
Two books about Benedict XVI
The bishop also indicates that soon “a book titled ‘Benedict XVI, Father of the Church, Doctor of Hope’ will be published.” In it we collect the texts of a colloquium about the German Pope that present him as a new ‘father of the Church’, precisely because he has been able to open new paths for the Church for a task with which it has been struggling for a long time, but that is still pending: the evangelization of Modernity.”
The prelate also recalls that recently the Chilean thinker Jaime Antúnez Aldunate published the book titled “Benedict XVI, the Pope of Modernity“, in which he highlights that “few or even no one like him has in fact been capable until now of making fruitful the inheritance of that great synod (as he calls the Second Vatican Council) in which the Catholic Church tried to settle the pending accounts with Modernity.”
Mons. Martínez Camino explains that “more than to condemn her, to offer her a way of salvation. As? Identifying precisely in their shortcomings, such as hedonism and rationalism, the places to build a possible bridge with the Christian faith.”
The Christian faith, recalls the Madrid prelate, “offers lasting happiness to those who know nothing other than temporary happiness and a logos open to the true Infinite to those who, thinking only autonomously and finitely, end up suffocating in their own loop.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.